The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many kinds of computer service providers need to measure the performance of client-server application programs or web-based applications to evaluate and troubleshoot the application experience of remote users, without having to install agents on remote computers of the users. Examples of such computer service providers include network service providers, cellular radiotelephone network service providers, mobile wireless network operators, web-based cloud computing storage providers, and others. The end user computers may include personal computers or mobile handheld devices.
In addressing this problem, the introduction of server application virtualization systems such as VMWARE can introduce important changes in users' perceived performance of an application that was previously running on a physical machine. The deployment of server virtualization needs to be accompanied by a technology that allows the careful measurement of the clients' application performance. Thus, IT professionals who are deploying virtualization systems desire to measure perceived application performance before and after the introduction of virtualization. Network operators prefer to conduct performance measurement without using measurement appliances close to the end user computers, and wish to measure performance without degrading performance of the server-based applications that are measured.